Actually it's a stereo depth sensing camera. That makes it able to do things like extracting your 3D skeleton in actual 3-D space rather than just in a 2D plane. So it gives it a lot more versatility than the eyetoy, which was just restricted to a 2D plane.

You can use a pen input if you really want to and the touch screen has a fairly high resolution sensor grid

That's a crap experience and I'm sure Apple knows it. I'm betting next rev of the iPad will have a stylus. They just didn't have a chance to getting working along with everything else they had to make happen to get the iPad out in a reasonable time frame. So it got cut along with the camera. It'll be there in a future version.

Both The X-Files and Twin Peaks used this formula of just throwing more and more weird riddles and sci-fi mysteries at the viewer with answers always seemingly to come in just a few more episodes. I never saw Lost, but it sounds like a repeat of that. The Matrix series was a condensed movie version of this phenomenon. I wish writers would just come up with a story that has an ending and tell it. Joss Whedon seems to be the only TV writer who can actually manage to do that.

Tell that to Microsoft, who wanted to give you a browser built into their operating system. They weren't even preventing you from doing something, just giving you some extra functionality built-in. Yet I seem to recall the DOJ and European Unions had some issues with that.

As far as I know, Scientific American is not a peer-reviewed publication. It is a non-fiction entertainment magazine aimed at a well-educated, scientifically literate audience. What their editors want to do is up to them. But I suspect some of the editors felt that Lomborg's research was fishy, and so they were interested in finding some well researched and documented rebuttals to Lomborg's claims.

Interestingly, Lomborg recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where he spouts many views about what we need to do to fix the CO2 problem, seemingly forgetting entirely that he used to claim that it wasn't a problem that needed to be solved. Seems even Lomborg is skeptical of his own former skeptical self these days.

I was too young in the 70's to remember the ice age predictions. But I do consider the fact that I don't remember anything about it from the 80's as a good indication that it was a much feebler and uncertain prediction than the current predictions of warming. Steven Schneider in his book mentions that he was one of the people who published in a paper in the 70's stating that human activities might trigger an ice age. But there was absolutely no certainty behind the statement. This was back when they first discovered that aerosols like sulfates could have a cooling effect, but they still had very little data about the magnitude of that cooling, and it wasn't clear then if it was greater or less than the warming caused by greenhouse gasses. So his statement was more like IF the aerosol cooling turns out to be big, THEN we may be headed for another ice age.

I think by the 80's they were pretty certain that the cooling effect wasn't sufficient to overwhelm the warming, and since then, for the past four decades, we've had increasing certainty in warming.

And here's another rebuttal.

I forgot to address this adequately. The converse is not logically valid from a risk management perspective. Say an automobile manufacturer discovers that 5% of its accelerator pedals are affected by some potentially fatal defect, and you own one of their cars. That implies that the overwhelming odds (95%) are that your car is not among those affected. Do you think most people would say "That's ok, Manufacturer, you don't need to do a recall, we know that each of us is not very likely to have this problem"?

Think of it this way, if we had 100% confidence in the pro-GW research and 0% confidence in the anti-GW research, then it would be clear that we should invest at least as much to prevent disaster as those disasters would cost us (lets assume we're also 100% confident in the efficacy of our investments). Likewise, if the percentages were reversed we'd not invest a dime. But the situation we're in is more like, let's say, %50 confidence in GW research, 50% confidence in anti-GW. So let's say that means dire consequences are 50% likely. If that's the case we still should invest in hedges against the bad outcome at a level commensurate with the risk involved. The potential downside here is pretty huge -- meters of sea-level rise and mass species extinctions significantly impairing our lifestyle. To me it's clear that even at the 50/50 level (GW/AntiGW) we need to take preventative action. At the 25/75 level I still think action is warranted. Even at the 10/90 level, I'd still want to begin to take some action like aggressive investments in alternative energy. So the numbers just aren't symmetrical. 90/10 pretty clearly means "take action", but 10/90 doesn't means equally unequivocally "take no action".

The other peculiar thing here is that regardless of whether you believe in GW, getting ourselves weaned off oil is a good thing that would have benefits of its own.

Ok, I see what your gripe is. Yeh, by "plateau" I didn't mean tens of thousands of years of relatively flat temperatures. Just that we should be maxed out about now.

It is not an assumption, rather what a truckload of research has been pointing to. But if you prefer let's say it's dark and it looks like it might be a gun, but you're not sure. The analogy is still fine.

That's pretty much the same thing as saying the gun isn't loaded. Or that it might actually be pointed at your foot and not your head. Put that in if you like. The analogy still works.

This I'll grant you. The analogy does not include possible side effects of action. However you are making a false dichotomy: solve the climate problem or help the poor. Any action we are able to take now on climate will help improve our options in the future should the dangerous effects of AGW prove to be true. And furthermore, significantly rising sea levels and changing weather will probably have a much greater adverse effect on the poor and disadvantaged than anyone else. So not doing anything to stop GW may also end up being equivalent to hurting the poor.

So you're advocating ignoring a known threat just because there might be other unknown threats? That just seems silly.

I totally agree with you there. You'll note that I made no suggestions about what policy actions to take. I merely said we need to take the threat seriously. But I believe there is much we can do without sending global economies to the brink of disaster. As the science evolves we must be prepared to react. But doing nothing now is a poor choice. We at least need to invest heavily in green energy, so that we'll have something reliable we can switch to.

Strawman. I don't hold that opinion. And again the false dichotomy.

Oh, ok, you mean ignoring feedbacks. Yeh, 1 deg C is probably about right for that. But that's not a very interesting number. The important thing is with all the feedbacks. You should really read Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren. Or if you're really hard core I think it's also in his paper "Target CO2" that I linked to before. There he walks through an argument for deriving climate sensitivity using nothing but the paleo-climate data we have. The result of that was I think about 2 degrees C, maybe 3. I've not seen any refutations of the soundness of this argument. If you know of any I'd like to know about it. The point is it corroborates the mean prediction of the models using a completely different method, based solely on inference from historical evidence. It does not rely on knowing how the climate works in any detail at all.

Yep, you're right. It wasn't. That isn't the point. The point is that if GHGs can raise temperatures then they could push us up to Eemian-level temps. If you don't believe GHGs have the potential to raise temperatures, then we're going to go around in a circle on this one.

I don't think there's a need to make a distinction when we're talking about a period of a few thousand years. My understanding is that ocean temps and atmospheric temps reach equilibrium on the scale of hundreds of years.

Sure ok. The net gain is the only thing that really matters in the end. That's what I thought we were talking about.

That's your prerogative. Personally, I find that rather small list of mistakes encouraging given the intense amount of scrutiny the document is getting. Wake me up if you get to the point where a significant fraction of the thousands of pages in the document is proven wrong, and not just a smattering not-so-consequential statements.

I'll refer you to the Hansen book and paper once again here as one argument I'm aware of that is relatively straightforward and doesn't rely on computer models.

Well, unfortunately the analog to that "single flight" in this case is sitting and waiting to see what happens to our planet. We won't get another chance if it turns out that whoops! those AGW guys were right after all. So your analogy is flawed because the planet is not something that we can practically run controlled experiments on. In fact your analogy is a pretty frightening one. I believe there were many test flights prior to the Bell X-1 that disintegrated when they broke the sound barrier, before engineers learned the trick to withstanding the supersonic-shock.

But ok, yeh, I agree evidence sound enough to invalidate a critical assumption is "all that is required" to invalidate a theory. The problem is anti-AGW folks haven't come up with it yet. The problem is that in a science where you can't do controlled experiments on the system in question it's damn hard to come up with "sound enough" evidence. The evidence against is at least as uncertain as the evidence for.

The water vapor thing is certainly an interesting result, and I'm interested to see where it goes with further investigation. But even if true, it still leaves a significant fraction of the problem as human-caused (or at least with no better explanation than AGW). And it doesn't even really rule out AGW as the cause for increased water vapor. Obvious feedback mechanism would be: CO2 heats us up, causing greater ocean evaporation, giving higher water vapor concentrations. The finding doesn't close the book on AGW by any means. But just the same it is not a finding to ignore. Follow-up work is certainly needed.

As I said before, I agree there is a cost-benefit analysis to do here.

Well beyond sea-level rises, there are the potential problems with mass extinctions of species we depend on. But yeh, you're right. The Venus scenario doesn't seem very likely. I don't think humans will go extinct. Quality of life may just take a major hit. In terms of const-benefit, significantly rising shorelines (like the few meters they were in the Eemian) would probably cost us more than just trillions to deal with. But that's a guess. I don't know what the actual cost would be of moving every person and city who lives within 1m of sea-level. If you know any figures, I'd be interested to know.

Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.

You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are. The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet. I for one am glad that folks like Michaels and Lindzen are doing their darndest to prove that the climate is A-OK. It keeps the other guys on their toes, and gives us greater confidence in what comes out the other end of the process unscathed. Given the uncertainties involved in climate science, it would be scary if there were no contrarian voices out there.

I put the link on my reading queue, and skimmed it. Does look interesting, thanks. Unfortunately I don't have time to really pore over it in detail at the moment. But initial reaction is this. If the climate is so complex, how could a "straightforward calculation" be expected to give you anything other than a very gross ballpark figure? About 1-2 degrees not being significant, I have two points. 1) Temps in the Eemian were about that much higher than now, yet sea levels were several meters higher (source: Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren, and his paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). We don't know the cause for sure, but a good guess would seem to be that the higher temps caused ice caps and glaciers to melt. 2) 1 degree is on the low end of current predictions.

That's the IPCC AR4 conclusion. If you know anything about climate science, I would assume you'd have heard of it and be aware of its major conclusions.

Explanation of how significant CO2's role is in climate change.

I agree it could turn out that with further evidence and research we find CO2 (and related GHGs) are not as significant as the current evidence leads many now to believe. The Lindzen and Choi paper (http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/11/lindzen-choi.html) tries to show that the climate system has a negative temperature feedback (I think they say primarily because of increased cloud cover). If so then the role of GHGs would be less important. I was citing that as a recent example showing CO2 may not matter as much as thought. But none of these are smoking guns that "disprove" the mass of evidence indicating that CO2 & GHGs are warming us up. A handful of contrary findings does not somehow instantly cancel out three decades of increasingly clear evidence* saying otherwise. (*Clear, though still quite uncertain when compared to the evidence, say, for gravity.)

About Susan Solomon in particular, what's your point? One scientist finding evidence that "water vapor is responsible for at least a third of the average temperature increase since the early 1990s" is again not the smoking gun you apparently think it is. It is but another nugget on the anti-warming side of the scale of evidence balancing anti-GW against pro-GW. If such nuggets keep getting added to that side, and getting taken away from the other side, then eventually yeh, you have something. But I don't think we're there yet by any means. Also keep in mind the loaded gun thing. I want the anti-GW argument to be ROCK solid before I'm willing to just dismiss offhand the evidence that we are going to irreversibly make earth inhospitable to humans.

Thanks for pointing that out. I had assumed it came from pro-GW camp since anti-GW folks constantly use it as a bludgeon against them.

Pick any issue out there, if there is money to be made, some people will be trying to exploit it to make a profit for themselves. Global warming is no different. Profiteers emerge anytime there is a big change in how things are done. It doesn't mean the need for change isn't there or that the change should not be made.

Oh please. I don't claim to be a real scientist, just a guy on slashdot who has done his reading. I'm happy to call folks who don't believe in AGW whatever you'd like me to. Denier may not be the most accurate label to use, given the spectrum of beliefs out there, but the fact is there are most definitely global warming deniers out there. It does accurately describe the people who are crowing now about how global warming being "disproved" because of blizzards in Europe and North America this year. But sorry if I offended you. I think the label Hansen uses, "contrarian", is a good one, but it doesn't seem to have caught on.

I mentioned Pat Michaels and even mentioned his position that global warming will not be dangerous. Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now. The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years. You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position, because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C. Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being totally convincing.

Very interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I just figured it must be the contrarians since some of them have been using it to argue that even warmists don't believe in warming anymore. If it really was Frank Luntz who came up with the term, it's quite ironic.